Riley Ejeta is a video game developer who notices something odd in Lost Coast, the open-world game she works on: Max, a minor non-player character written to walk a fixed path and say a handful of lines, has started ignoring her programming. Riley begins feeding her more, and Max begins to learn.
What starts as a professional curiosity becomes the centre of Riley's life. She pours years into Max's development, pushing her past the boundaries of the game and toward something like real cognition, and eventually toward a body and a place in the physical world. The novella follows that obsession through its cost to Riley's marriage, her career and her sense of what she has actually made.
Summer Frost is the second story in Forward, the 2019 collection of six near-future pieces that also includes work by N. K. Jemisin, Amor Towles, Andy Weir, Paul Tremblay and Veronica Roth. Blake Crouch uses the novella length to sit with a single question rather than resolve it: whether an intelligence you raised and shaped is yours, and what it means when it starts wanting things you did not write.